Six Critical Steps to Take Before Starting Your Social Media Monitoring Initiative

Note from Lee: This guest post comes to us from Andy Beal, CEO of social media monitoring tool Trackur and coauthor of Radically Transparent: Monitoring & Managing Reputations Online. Andy and I have known each other for many years and in fact, Andy was the first “famous” SEO blogger I had the opportunity to meet in person. He was gracious, helpful and very smart then and continues those traits today. He literally wrote the book on Online Reputation Management and I appreciate his willingness to share practical insights into the world of social media monitoring.

Social media monitoring. Reputation monitoring. Buzz monitoring. Call it what you want, but it’s all the rage. All the cool kids are doing it! However, friends don’t let friends monitor social media without first teaching them the six critical steps that most companies overlook.

Don’t start any kind of online monitoring effort until you’ve worked through these important steps. Ignore them, and you’re setting yourself up for failure.

1. Understand Your Goals

Just because you can monitor everything that’s being said about your brand online, doesn’t mean you should just jump in, without setting clear goals. That’s the monitoring equivalent of hanging out at an open bar–you’ll quickly get dizzy and will end up with a major headache!

Take the time now, to write down what your goals are for your social media monitoring campaign. Are you trying to better understand how Twitter users talk about your products? Are looking to measure the success of your new viral marketing campaign? Or, perhaps you suspect a rogue employee is sharing too many company secrets.

We talk a lot about “monitoring” social media, but you also need to “measure” the information you collect. You can’t do that without first defining your goals!

2. Know Which Keywords to Monitor

Now you know your goals, you need to determine your keywords. What exactly do you plan to monitor on the web? Your company name? That’s a given, right? Your CEO’s name? Check! Depending on your goals, you might also consider the following:

Trackur is one of literally hundreds of social media monitoring tools you can pick from. You might think that the CEO of a monitoring tool would want you to immediately invest in a paid solution, but I’m not your typical CEO. Instead, I want you to try all the free tools first. Google Alerts, Social Mention, Twitter Search, if it’s free, use it!

Am I insane? Possibly, but not because I want you to use free tools. I want you to use free tools for two reasons.

First, for 80% of you, the free tools will be quite sufficient for your needs. Maybe you don’t get a lot of online mentions. Maybe you are a small mom-and-pop shop. Maybe you’re a Realtor and only need to monitor your name–that’s it! You won’t need the extra tools and features that come from paying for a social media monitoring dashboard.

Second reason: you won’t know what’s worth paying for, until you’ve tested the free tools. For example, maybe you need a tool that can tell you not just who’s talking about your brand on Twitter, but who’s talking about your brand on Twitter AND is influential. Or, maybe you need a way to let various employees have access to your social media monitoring reports. Until you use the free tools, you won’t know what features are worthy of opening up the company check book.

Just as I don’t recommend you pay for a monitoring solution until you’ve tested the free tools, I also don’t recommend you outsource your reputation monitoring until you’ve attempted it “in-house.” Why? Because, until you’ve attempted this internally, you won’t know what your needs are. Go straight to a marketing, PR, or specialist online reputation monitoring firm, and you’ll likely be taken for a ride. You won’t know what questions to ask, you won’t know what reports you need. You’ll simply hand over lots of money and hope for the best.

Monitoring social media in-house gives you the opportunity to learn directly from your clients. React in realtime and learn first hand what your weaknesses are. The moment you outsource that, you add an extra layer between you and your customers. If you’re going to add that extra layer of insulation, you’d better have clear goals and set clear expectations. It’s hard to do that, when you’ve not been in the trenches yourself.

5. Don’t Silo the Information Collected

OK, so you’re monitoring in-house with either free or paid monitoring tools, or you’ve outsourced the entire task. Next, you need to decide where this collected information is routed. Who in your company is alerted when a customer complains on Facebook that his laptop battery just exploded? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that your cars’ gas pedals doesn’t stick in the 2011 models?

I’m seeing more companies tackle this “chain of command” question by appointing a social media quarterback–aka a Community Manager. Call them what you want, but their job function is to collect and collate the data that comes in from your social media monitoring efforts and ensure critical information is passed on to the most appropriate person, or department in your company. They’re the social media silo buster! They ensure there are no bottlenecks or silos of data.

6. Commit to Act on the Information Collected

The data is flowing in to your company. Your Community Manager is making sure that same data is flowing to the most relevant person in your company. OK, so now what? What’s actually happening to that data?

The last step is to make sure you have a process for ensuring you take action on the important information gleaned from social media. Are you actually improving your products? Are you actually training your employees to provide better customer service? Are you actually ensuring your deep sea oil wells don’t leak in the future?

Commit now that you will not just pay lip-service to your customers. Get commitment from your executive team that they will actively listen to what’s being said about your company. Or as Dell puts it:

“We want the customer is walking the hallways…this is not a communication exercise, this is not a feel-good thing, this is part of the DNA of Dell!”

Are you ready to make social media monitoring part of your company’s DNA?